The iPhone has a pretty decent battery life at around 8 hours of talk time, but with an ‘unreplaceable’ battery that will eventually lose some of its ability to hold a charge you will still end up lugging the charger with you on anything but a weekend away.
Apple has filed a patent that might mean that in the future you can ditch the charger, and do a little bit to help the environment as well by integrating solar power into mobile handsets.
The problem with slapping a solar panel on a phone is where do you put it? Once you haveleft space for a screen and (traditionally, anyway) a keypad you don’t have a great deal of real estate to play with.
The patent, entitled “Solar cells on portable devices” suggests that a solar cell could have other transparent materials layered onto it – providing a surface that can be used for display or input.
In other words, that lovely big iPhone screen might be able to double up as a lovely big solar power plant.
Given that we don’t all live in Cupertino, it’s likely that this will be intended to augment an existing mains charger by topping up the battery whenever there is sufficient sunlight, but it’s a start – and with a decent summer you may not have to plug in for months.
Just don’t be tempted to go somewhere brighter just for the sake of your phone – you know what hell iPhone roaming charges can be.
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